Annette Fortt

Artist Statement 

These works express both the hope inherent in technology that enhances our lives and the danger of letting it define or replace us. In collagraphs, acrylic paintings and assemblages, I incorporate recycled prints, salvaged and simulated objects, inspired by circuit boards, CDs and floppy discs. The aim of these works is to start considering the continuum of human communication, even into this age of artificial intelligence, so full of potential. 

Annette Gandy Fortt is a native of Memphis, Tennessee, where she graduated from the University of Memphis (formerly Memphis State) with a major in Art Education.  She participated in the latter years of the Great Migration, moving east to New York City in the late 1960s.  There she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at Pratt Institute before eventually settling in the Washington, D.C. area.  Her work reflects the diversity of her experience, both in media and subject matter: paintings, prints, and assemblages tell of the Black experience, the woman’s experience, the spiritual, and the organic. 

“From the time I could hold a pencil or a wad of clay, I was making images.  I was born to create, and over the years the only thing that has changed is how I make my mark and what it expresses.  I started with the imaginary scribblings of childhood; now, I work both from life and the mind to represent and record the world around me. 

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Susan Goldman

Artist Statement 

I’m playing with what can happen inside and outside variations on themes as they continue to reconfigure over time. My process comes out of a love of pattern, still life, antiquities and the underlying passion for color. The basic premise is beauty, making the world beautiful because the world is not always beautiful. Combining images requires a separate printing for each step. Every color impacts the composition as the layers build. What will happen when I play with and overlay different colors as several things happen at once? Structure, deconstruction, repetition and layering is playful, improvisational and full of surprises. There is an element of mystery and​I can depend on printmaking to give me back a result that I couldn’t have seen at the beginning.

Susan J. Goldman, artist, master printmaker, curator, writer and filmmaker, is Founding Director of Printmaking Legacy Project®, (PLP®) a non-profit based in Rockville, Maryland, dedicated to the documentation and preservation of printmaking practice and history. In 2025 and 2024, she produced and directed the documentaries, PORTFOLIOS: Lloyd Menard and Black Printmakers of Washington, DC Percy B. Martin & Michael B. Platt. She was curator for Forward Press: 21st American Printmaking, PLP®’s premier 2019 major national print exhibition for the greater Washington DC community, at the American University Museum, Katzen Center for the Arts.  

Goldman received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant 2011-12, as producer and director of Midwest Matrix ®, an hour-long groundbreaking documentary on the fine art printmaking tradition of the American Midwest. She has produced several documentaries since about significant printmakers, Goldman is also Founding Director of Lily Press®, which began as a private studio in 2000. Her collaborative projects have included: Elizabeth Catlett, Victor Ekpuk, Halim Flowers, Sam Gilliam, Keiko Hara, Mindy Weisel, Eve Stockton and Renee Stout. 

Goldman received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Indiana University-Bloomington in 1981, and Master of Fine Arts from Arizona State University-Tempe, in 1984. After moving to Washington in 1990, Goldman taught printmaking at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, MICA, Georgetown University, and was Master Printer/Program Director at Pyramid Atlantic. From 2000-2012 was Adjunct Professor/Master Printer for Navigation Press at George Mason University-Fairfax. 

Goldman sustains a full-time vibrant studio practice producing and exhibiting her own work nationally and internationally. She is represented by Galerie Myrtis, Baltimore, MD; Palmer Art, Larchmont, NY; Adah Rose Gallery Kensington, Maryland; Longview Gallery, Washington, D.C and Massoni Art in Chestertown, MD. Her work is in private and public collections worldwide. 

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Maggie Gourlay

Artist Statement

My present body of work is a series of hand-made quilts tied to time and place—dyed, screenprinted and ecoprinted with plants foraged from the land under investigation. I select different locations for each quilt, and let the materials and my research into place guide me as to content and composition. The ecology of the land is embedded in the materials gathered at that particular time, as the time and place affects the color and selection of leaves used to pigment the quilts. 

These Mapping Stories quilts reflect both a desire to understand a given place through tactile direct experience, and artistic research. Imprinted in each quilt are traces of the leaves from the site investigated as well as a human imprint—a formal expression of conceptual ideas regarding the transitory nature of time and the ecological transformation of spaces. 

Screenprinting and ecoprinting are key components of Maggie Gourlay’s printmaking practice on fiber. In Gourlay’s work the confluence of deep time and human history meet. Her interest in environmental issues has led her to researching natural dyes and the pigments derived from them both as a means to create a greener art practice and as a medium in her artwork—a formal expression of conceptual ideas regarding nature. A recipient of DC Arts and Humanities Council art grants, as well as Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts residency awards, Gourlay has also had numerous solo and group shows with her work in several private and public collections. As a member of Cultivate Projects, an artist-run platform for a contemporary redefinition of landscape, Gourlay participates in an ongoing dialogue about art and environment. A long-time Maryland resident, Gourlay received her MFA in studio art from Towson University and is represented by Adah Rose Gallery. 

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Deborah Grayson

Artist Statement  

I work in woodcut and multiple forms of lithography—plate, stone, wood, and linoleum—to engage printmaking as a practice of witnessing. My current work centers water—particularly estuaries—as a generative metaphor for how Black people create and carry our histories. In these works, the estuary is a fluid space where currents collide, layer, and transform. It is here, in this in-between space, that I specifically locate relationships to ancestral memory, rupture, and renewal. In doing so, I build dense, shifting surfaces that mirror the movement of water itself—tidal, recursive, and uncontained. Forms emerge and dissolve, suggesting histories that are not fixed but carried and reimagined across time. 

Using vernacular, ethnographic and medical photographs from the early 20th century as source material, Deborah Grayson examines historical archives to trace Black women’s life-stories.

Moving between figuration and abstraction, the historical and the intergalactic, the spiritual and the profane, Grayson uses printmaking and drawing to re/animate the rich but neglected and sometimes quiet stories of Black women’s lives.

In her work Grayson builds an archive of images and artifacts that reflect Black women’s experiences and expressions of love, desire, ambition, hunger, vulnerability, spirituality, fear and joy. In particular, Grayson is interested in examining both quiet and silence as modes of Black women’s expressiveness and what they both reveal and protect about the inner lives of Black women in order to enable a more nuanced understanding of their lives. 

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Susan Due Pearcy

Artist Statement   

Susan was raised in St. Louis, MO and was fortunate to have a mother who was a watercolor artist. She took classes at the St. Louis Art Museum and excelled in the arts in school. College took her to SE MO State University, Cape Girardeau, from 1963-66 where she majored in Art Education. She married Glen J. Pearcy, a photographer/filmmaker in 1966 and moved to Cambridge, MA and then to NewYork City where both resumed studies. In 1967 Glen took an intern year from Union Theological Seminary to work in the civil rights movement with the Southwest Georgia Project. We returned to NY and Susan completed a degree at NYU in Painting, Graphics and Sculpture in 1969. Following graduation she studied etching and lithography at the Art Students League in NYC with Michael Ponce de Leon. 

In 1970 we moved back to Georgia to continue working with the Movement where Susan worked as an art consultant in Headstart, taught woodcut and created graphics for the Southwest Georgia Project newsletter. In 1972 we moved to LaPaz, CA to work at the headquarters of the United Farmworkers Union where she did graphic art for the union’s newspaper, “El Malcriado” and designed political buttons and bumper strips. 

Our work with the farmworkers took us to San Francisco, CA where Susan took workshops in reduction woodblock printing, etching and life drawing. She worked at a community center teaching arts and crafts and volunteered at her children’s school creating a mural with kindergarten children. 

In 1979 we moved to Silver Spring, MD where I pursued my interest in printmaking and joined the Washington Women’s Art Center and the Graphic Art Workshop. I was active in the Washington Area Printmakers and the Washington Printmakers Gallery for 12 years. Susan painted with the group, Somerset Seven for six years. In 1983 she began volunteering at NIH once a week, working in art with hospitalized children. She continues this work. 

Susan has been in numerous exhibits locally, nationally and internationally. Her work is in private and museum collections. 

In 1995 a move to rural Barnesville, MD provided Susan with a studio behind their home which allowed her to pursue her art full time. She got involved with the Hyattstown Mill Art Center in the weekly drawing group; the Countryside Artisans Tour three times a year; the Frederick Plein Air Painters and Maryland Pastel Society as a Signature Member. She has taught from her studio and other venues and serves as a juror in competitions. Her work has been published and reviewed frequently over the years. 

Susan has 2 children who are both in creative fields. Her husband died of cancer in 2016. 

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Lynn Sures

Artist Statement 

My artistic practice is devoted to interpreting the study of human origins and ecology, and I look to the sciences of anthropology, geology and physics to help inform my search for the commonalities between humans over the eons. Occasionally, in the studio I work tangentially to that primary focus because a compelling aspect of contemporary society calls me strongly to add my voice. This is the case with my piece, We Speak of Slavery in the Past Tense. Human trafficking in all its guises has been more and more persistently in my thoughts, while it is ever more prominently addressed in our socio/political discourse. Victims of human trafficking are among the most vulnerable human beings, living in fear and lacking agency over their lives, hidden and exploited. The veil of time bonds victims past and present. Human beings are in servitude and each of us can take the time to notice.   

Lynn Sures creates multi-media works examining the juncture of geology, physics and the origins of humans. She has been a SARF Fellow in Kenya and a US State Department American Artist Abroad in Sri Lanka. Residencies include Museu Molí Paperer de Capellades, Spain; the Press at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, NM, and Kalamazoo (MI) Book Arts Center residency funded by the NEA. Exhibitions include the American University Katzen Museum, DC; and Isik University Gallery, Istanbul. Collections include the US Dept. of State; US Library of Congress; Yale University; Schomburg Collection at NY Public Library; Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum; Museo della Carta e della Filigrana, Fabriano, Italy; Museum of Art & Photography-MAP, Bangalore, India; and Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt. Sures is co-author of Radical Paper: Art and Invention with Colored Pulp, published by The Legacy Press in 2024 and winner of the 2025 Eric Hoffer Award in the category of Art. She was Hand Papermaking guest editor, Winter 2016, on papermaking of Italy; and President of the North American Hand Papermakers, 2018–2020. Sures is Professor Emerita, Corcoran College of Art & Design (GWU), DC. 

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Caroline Thorington

Artist Statement  

I am enchanted by the animate and the double entendre. I enjoy making prints that are not exactly what they seem. It is always very interesting to see the different ways in which my images are perceived and to watch the surprise when people encounter the unexpected. 

Although Thorington began drawing as a young child, she did not encounter printmaking until on an Exchange Fellowship to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, Germany, which she received after graduating from Kansas State University. This was her introduction to etching (in German: Radierung), a form of printmaking she was to use the rest of her life. On her return to the United States a year later, she found she had no English vocabulary for etching, but was quick to learn it. She continued to be captivated by printmaking and expanded her knowledge of it to include lithography in graduate school at George Washington University. She found that she enjoyed working with Tusche washes so much that she became a master lithographer with the help of a post graduate course at the Tamarind Studio in New Mexico. Thorington then set up her own studio where she continues actively to make lithographs, etchings and print folios. Thorington taught printmaking and drawing as adjunct professor at Montgomery College, Rockville, MD for twenty-five years. She also has conducted seven workshops including “Tusche Washes” presented at the 28th Southern Graphic Council Conference in Miami, FL. Besides occasional workshops, she had been a Visiting artist at various universities including being a Matrix Visiting artist at the University of Dallas in Texas. During the pandemic, she was featured by the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University where her work, “Shanti” was displayed in the exhibition, “Two by Two, Animal Pairs”. As it was during 2021 she gave her talk “On Natural History and Other Prints” about her work in a Zoom presentation online for the ‘Let’s Talk Art’ Series in conjunction with the Exhibition. Her work is in seventy-seven museum and contemporary collections including the China Printmaking Museum, Guanlan, Shenzhen, China, the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA and, University of Wales Collection, Aberystwyth, Wales. 

Numerous awards and commissions include: the 2022 Speedball Art Products Materials Award in Lithography at the 87th SAGA Exhibition in New York City, NY and the Boston Printmakers North American Biennial Exhibition’s 2018 Collaborative Print Award which gave her the opportunity of working with another master lithographer, Carolyn Muskat, on two lithographs in her Muskat Studios in Boston, MA. Commissions include everything from portraits of dogs and etchings of money changers commissioned by individuals to commissions by institutions such as the Print Society of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO. She created the lithograph, “Waiting for the Concert to Begin” for them as the 2003 Commission Print for their museum. The Boston Printmakers were pleased to make her “Phone-a-Frog – Frog-a-Phone” lithograph part of their print collection in 2023. She will be going to the 9th International Lithographic Symposium in Tidaholm, Sweden this summer of 2026 as an active participant and exhibitor. 

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